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Terpstra: Don't panic over Novell-Microsoft deal

Life is interesting, isn't it? Who would have guessed at the number of changes in our industry over the past 12 months?

My first reaction to the news of Microsoft's support for Linux was: "Wow! incredible!" Oh, I guess that was the reaction all round.

Then I re-read the Microsoft-Novell announcement and thought about it some more. I wonder if the wording of the announcement is designed to stir up those within the open source movement/community who are branded by the "establishment" as radicals. You know, that is not the first time that has happened!

Taking the high road

My alarm bells are ringing, not because of the announcement but rather over concern that those of us who strive the hardest to protect our liberties might overreact and, in the process, do long-term injury to the cause for liberties in respect of software development.

The patent cross licensing dealthat Microsoft and Novell unveiled last Thursday will be incompatible with the GPL3 license and is likely incompatible with the current GPL2 license, alleged Eben Moglen, a law professor and open source activist.

Section seven of the current general public license (GPL2) prohibits people or corporations from distributing the GPL code if they have entered into anyagreements that contradict the conditions of the license.

It's a dog eat dog world, and anyone surprised at Novell's new "partnership" hasn't been watching Novell's piss poor financial performance these last few years.

When the stockholders are looking for heads to put on a pike, you know something is going to change.

Of course I find it amusing that all the tales of devil worship and open source woes come mostly from people using OpenSuse and not from the people who actually supported Novell/SUSE financially by buying licenses. For those that have SUSE enterprise, nothing changes, except that future release might have better AD integration because of the partnership.

Go figure, a company the size of Novell would actually have to sell products and services so that they can employ all their workers and still make a profit to keep their stockholders happy.

Kind of ironic (in a sad way), the once mighty Novell that was champion of the Networked PC market and ate Microsoft's lunch now has to partner up with them in order to stay a float.

Leftovers: Software

All the *mm projects now require C++11. Current versions of g++ require you to use the –std=c++11 option for this, but the next version will probably use C++11 by default. We might have done this sooner if it had been clearer that g++ (and libstdc++) really really supported C++11 fully.

I have just released version 1.13 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

MusicTube is a very interesting music player designed for multiple platforms using YouTube as the music source. It's not made for locally hosted music, and you can't add other online sources, but YouTube is a huge resource.

today's leftovers

Most of our services are in Go, and thanks to the fact that compiled Go binaries are mostly-statically linked by default, it’s possible to create containers with very few files within. It’s surely possible to use these techniques to create tighter containers for other languages that need more runtime support, but for this post I’m only focusing on Go apps.

Enabling Multipath TCP on the smartphone is the first step in deploying it. However, this is not sufficient since there are very few servers that support Multipath TCP today. To enable their users to benefit from Multipath TCP for all the applications that they use, KT has opted for a SOCKSv5 proxy. This proxy is running on x86 servers using release 0.89.5 of the open-source Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. During the presentation, SungHoon Seo mentioned that despite the recent rollout of the service, there were already 5,500 active users on the SOCKS proxy the last time he checked. Thanks to this proxy, the subscribes of the Giga Path service in Korea can benefit from Multipath TCP with all the TCP-based applications that they use.

On August 1, Artyom Zorin had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of his Zorin OS 10 GNU/Linux operating system, distributed as Core and Ultimate editions, based on Ubuntu 15.04.

I’ve meant to do this for ages, so on my first day of my “staycation”, despite vowing to myself that I wouldn’t look at a computer screen this week (hey, it’s not actually the technical start of my week off is it?), I fiddled this morning with BIND to try and avoid seeing ads on my devices. While AdBlock works great on my browsers, that doesn’t transfer well to mobile devices and apps with built-in advertising, etc.

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